Which rhyme with nice but are not. Which reduce to louse, singular, word favored by many of our mothers for a missing, a cheating, a ne’er-do-well spouse. And then the adjective—lousy—more prevalent in those days than now. Sometimes fathers had a lousy week at the office. Sometimes families had a lousy trip to the shore. Lousy: a permissible way to express displeasure, even contempt, without resorting to the verboten profane. Profanity, after all, could get you sent to your room, your mouth scrubbed out with soap, or worse if the Lord’s name was taken in vain. But lousy had a strange twist to it, a little corkscrew in the language that opened a different bottle. To be lousy with something also meant to have an excess of it—lousy with cookies, say, before you sold them for your troop, or lousy with pennies and dimes before you rolled them in cardboard sleeves, then skated to the bank with a fanny pack full of corseted change. Suddenly, lousy didn’t seem like such a bad thing. No longer akin to an infestation. You could be lousy with bubblegum or trading cards or a holiday pack of Hershey’s kisses, and that wasn’t lousy at all. Weird, right? How lousy could actually mean the opposite of itself—and so far removed from lice that you forgot all about them, at least for a while. You, singular here, not the bumbershoot plural: you liked words, always had, found them worthy of robust consideration. Lousy was interesting for lots of reasons, one of which was the “s” at the end masquerading as a far more scintillating letter. Louse rhymed with house and blouse, swishy at the end as your cat’s soft tail. Not so with the modifier, though, which didn’t rhyme with mousy, its look-alike word. Lousy refused to be mousy at all. It was a bold word, with big, double-Z, razzmatazz energy. If you were famous, you could be lousy with paparazzi, and the sound-echo there made you laugh. Not quite a rhyme but not quite a not-rhyme either. Lousy belonged to the same cohort as dazzle and swizzle, frazzle and guzzle—other things done with excess, aplomb. You, yes, singular you, made lists of words you loved, and lousy always placed among them. Sometimes you wrote LOU-Z just for fun, though once Selena asked, looking over your shoulder, “Who’s Lou Z?” like he was a boy and not a spelling variation. You flushed and stammered, and when you said it wasn’t a name, you could tell she didn’t believe you. For months after, “How’s your boyfriend, Lou Z?” Which was CRAY-Z for all kinds of reasons, but the E-Z-est to explain was because you were only in third grade. Who has a boyfriend in third grade? Well, OK. Selena did. The point is, you were not the kind of kid who followed suit or fell in line. No one ever mistook you for anybody else. In first grade, chicken pox broke out in your class the way the Kool-Aid man broke through walls—sudden, full-tilt, warranting a string of interjections: BLAMMO! WHAMMO! KAPOW! Everyone was red and scratching, the false freckles swelling on their skin. Miss Campbell said, “Sit her next to him,” and so you sat beside the boy whose mother couldn’t come to get him—not just then—since the grown-ups said, “It’s so much worse to get it when you’re grown. It’s so much better to get it when you’re young.” But you didn’t get it. Your skin did not go up in stippled flames. (Back then, you see, there was no vaccine.) Instead, you got fixated on the word pox. The huge dictionary, fanned out on its stand, provided a surprising diagnosis. Yes, yes, a viral disease (such as chicken pox) characterized by multiple, blistering pustules, but as you slid your finger down—the best definitions were never first—you found used interjectionally to express distaste, rejection, aversion, as in “a pox upon you!” A pox was a curse, and a curse was lousy to the extreme! Your classmates were lousy with chickenpox in both senses of the word, and you were fevered only with the language, your skin clear and cool as gold. You did not catch chickenpox, which is to say you eluded the curse. So contagious! All the adults seemed stunned, slowly coming around to laud your stellar immune system. “Her grandmother hasn’t had it to this day,” your mother offered, getting swept up for the moment in your unpockability. This was weird, too: pocks versus pox. The affliction of a pox (there were several: small, chicken, something called syphilis, which you sounded out) could result in scars called pocks (sometimes pockmarks), like divots in the skin, little pockets (ooh! you heard the resemblance then!) where the pustule had been but was no more. Joy’s mother bathed her in oatmeal, then forced her to wear mittens so she wouldn’t scratch. Ten whole days of fuzzy hands. Pocks were evidence that the pox continued even after the disease had passed. It was the same reason you, collectively, were forbidden to scratch scabs, though you did so, collectively. Peeling them off brought such pleasure, though you, singular, supposed on further reflection that you were actually pocking yourselves. (Conscious masochism was still some years off.) But in third grade, lice broke out, and you didn’t believe that you could get them. Don’t share hairbrushes! they warned. (You hadn’t.) Don’t try on someone else’s hat!, they worried. (You hadn’t.) By third grade, nobody would have trusted you—yes, singular you—with their hairbrush, let alone their hat. Don’t share pillows at slumber parties!, but you hadn’t even been invited to those. How did it happen? You’ll never know. One day Mrs. Moak was passing down the aisle, and she stopped beside you. Maybe to admire your new penmanship? But that wasn’t it. So far you had only earned her red pen’s worth of checks and minuses—pocking you, which rhymed with docking you, which she also was. Yes, you, singular you. In penmanship, you would never earn a plus. “We’ve got a live one here,” she said, in her deep voice that never failed to surprise. That was silly, you thought. Of course you were alive. But then there was a fuss and a phone call home to your mother, something like a garbage bag squeaking around your head, and then someone was shrieking, someone who turned out to be you. Because the moment Mrs. Moak said it, she had afflicted you—a pox upon that rat’s nest of yours!—but it wasn’t rats, and everybody knew. The outbreak from which you believed yourself immune had finally reached you. Selena rolled her eyes like it couldn’t happen to her, even though it had already happened to her. How smug everyone became in the aftermath of their own survival. You could feel them, it had to be them, the lice wriggling against your skull, establishing neighborhoods, churches and schools, a circus where they would take their whole lice families on weekends. “I will not tolerate these hysterics,” your mother said, and for once, you were allowed to sit in the car alone while she went into Pay ‘n’ Save to purchase a kit. It was a wastebasket liner Mrs. Moak put on your head, tight and white as an eggshell, not a huge black Hefty bag like the kind your father filled with mown grass and fallen leaves. Still, you caught sight in the mirror, and that set off the shrieking again. All those lice trapped inside and writhing. You could feel them! This was like leprosy in the Bible, another kind of pox! You would have written it down, too, if you hadn’t been shaking so hard you couldn’t hold a pencil. All those perms your mother gave you at home so people would think your hair curled naturally. Since preschool, the beauty shop robe and gauzy neck wrap, the curlers and shears and stack of magazines on which you sat since the chair she had didn’t pump higher. Small mercy now: she had the tools and makeshift shop to conduct this procedure expeditiously. Into the sink she dunked you, a new baptism with a fine-toothed comb. Over the sink you cried upside down, choking on your snot and your tears as the stinging elixir burned its way down each vibrating strand of hair. Like the cigarettes you wouldn’t try for many years, but instead of ash, a serum harsh and clear. “I know they’re still crawling around in there!” The lice plural, the pox made manifest, and then their white bodies began dropping, sliding down the silver drain. Each one a louse. Deeply unpleasant, profoundly profane. You wanted to shout all the words you were still forbidden to say. The clothes, the towels, the sheets—everything swirling in a scalding wash. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. You may have contaminated the whole house. Then, your father asking about dinner, and your mother shouting for him to get out. “Can’t you see I’m a little indisposed at the moment?” So of course he wanted to know what that was all about, and that’s when she snapped, gloves crinkling in your ears: “Bill, Goddamnit, what the hell’s the matter with you! I am right in the middle of delousing our daughter!” Delousing. The word settled over you like a cloud that was also a spell. Calming, in the way that sometimes only a word could quell. Your mother meant to rid singular you of each singular louse, and in the process, to undo the lousy—both the terrible and the abundant at once. Now the two lousies had coalesced into the many-awful, the horrible-plenty. Your misery (yes, yours!) was plural-yet-singular, was worthy of the finest profanity, had been made bearable, just barely, by this blessing of a sharp, particular name.
Julie Marie Wade is a member of the creative writing faculty at Florida International University in Miami. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, her collections of poetry and prose include Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, Small Fires: Essays, Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems, When I Was Straight, Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems, Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, and Skirted. Her collaborative titles include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, written with Denise Duhamel, and Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, written with Brenda Miller. Wade makes her home in Dania Beach with her spouse Angie Griffin and their two cats. Her newest projects are Fugue: An Aural History, out now from New Michigan Press, and Otherwise: Essays, selected by Lia Purpura for the 2022 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Book Prize, out now from Autumn House.
Photo by: John (Adobe Stock)